Space Topics: Hubble Space Telescope
The Year in Pictures: 2009
The New Pillars of Creation
Newborn stars in the Carina nebula in visible and infrared light
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team
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On top is a colorful pillar of gas and
dust photographed by Hubble’s ultraviolet and visible
channel of the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). Below, we
are looking at the same pillar, only this image is in
the infrared.
The structure we see is a three-light-year-long
cloud of dense material, shaped by its interaction
with radiation from stars both within and without.
The cloud is opaque in visible wavelengths, but
when we look at the same region in the infrared, the
cloud becomes a transparent, ghostlike feature, and
four bright newborn stars are now visible. One of the
stars has two jets blasting from its poles. Such activity
is observed only in stars under 100,000 years old.
WFC3 was
installed on the
Hubble Space Telescope by the astronauts
of the space shuttle Atlantis in May of this year. WFC3 replaced the workhorse
Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, upgrading its ultraviolet- and
visible-light wide-field imaging to a slightly wider
field of view at slightly higher resolution. WFC3 also
added the capability of wide-field imaging in infrared
wavelengths.
Blink comparison of visible and infrared Hubble images of Carina nebula
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team / blink gif by Emily Lakdawalla
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